The etchings were found on the walls of an ancient limestone cistern, as Ilan Ben Zion writes:

A group of Israel Caving Club members were exploring hidden caves in the Judean lowlands . . . when they discerned the carvings: a three-footed menorah with seven branches similar to the one that stood in the Jerusalem temple, a cross, and a depiction of an ancient key. Other as-yet-unidentified carvings were also found. . . .

Sa’ar Ganor, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, . . . studied the engravings and determined that the menorah was likely carved sometime during the Second Temple period—about 530 BCE to 70 CE—and the cross likely in the Byzantine period, around the 4th century CE.

“It’s rare to find a wall engraving of a menorah,” which is a “distinctly Jewish symbol,” Ganor said. . . [O]nly two menorah engravings exist in the region where it was found: one in an oil press at Beit Loya and the other in a tomb near Beit Guvrin—both east of the modern city of Kiryat Gat.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.